Over the past few weeks, we released and iterated upon a number of features on Judy’s Book aimed at user convenience and making it easier to get and track deals you care about.

Deal Bookmarking and Tagging

This features allows a user to save deals with notes and tags and then review them at their leisure. Saved deals can be marked private and by using tags, users can also generate shopping lists. We roll up people’s aggregate activity to provide a snapshot of the deals/categories and stores that people are saving. This is a small step along the road to providing a personalized lens into our database of deals. As users tag and bookmark deals, we build a list of their favorite stores and categories and we’ll use these in the near future to present more relevant deals to the user.

One of the coolest things for me over the past few weeks was seeing this set of features evolve from a ‘quick and dirty, let’s get it out implementation’ to something much more polished. A great example of this is the User Tags page. The initial version was just a text based list of tags which did the job but wasn’t super exciting:

Tag Page Before

The current version is a much more interesting, visual way to explore a user’s tags.

Tag Page After

Mousing over a thumbnail gives you the deal title, clicking on a tag provides a more detailed view of the deals associated with that tag and the alpha bar and right nav strip allow you to quickly navigate a user’s tags. User favorite stores and categories will be coming very soon. Big round of thanks to everyone that worked on this. It was definitely a collaborative effort and I’m really happy with the end result. Favorite stores and categories (inferred as opposed to reported) will be coming soon.

RSS Feeds Galore

Any page you can generate on our site can be turned into an RSS feed that will update anytime new deals meeting that criteria exist. For example, you can get a feed for Restaurant Deals in Seattle, or for Electronics deals with free shipping and add those to your feed reader. Our goal is for users to be able to obtain deals in any form that’s convenient to them and RSS is an important part of that. Being able to customize the feed to obtain the slice of our data that’s right for you is something I’m really happy that we can deliver on.

Back End Improvements

In addition to user facing features, there have been and will continue to be a number of back end improvements which affect things like expired & spam deal removal and surfacing the best deals. The impact of these changes is less visible in any one go, but add up to a significantly better user experience over time. We’re constantly working on this area of the site and the goal here is to display great deals to the user no matter which page of the site they interact with.

There’s a lot more coming over the next few weeks and while the amount of work ahead of us can feel a little daunting at times, I’m really excited about where we’re headed.